What happened to the treasures looted by the Romans from the Temple of Jerusalem? What happened to the Ark of the Covenant? What happened to the Holy Grail?

This has been a miserable week. Our beloved cat, Edith - named after the sister of King Harold Godwinsson, and an aptly regal and elegant pet - has vanished. Of course, she may still be alive, but we have reached the stage now where we suspect the worst. Despite all the desperate ringing around local vets and all the pathetic posters we have put up, long since bedraggled with the rain, it looks as though Harold, her brother, is now an only cat.

At least yesterday gave me and Sadie, my wife, the chance to get out and cheer ourselves up a bit. Most evenings this week we have spent slumped miserably in front of the TV, watching thoroughly depressing programmes full of mayhem and calamity - Red Riding, The Wire, the news. Yesterday, however, was the opening of a wonderful new gallery at the British Museum, devoted to the art and culture of medieval Europe. It is small - nothing on the scale of the Musée de Cluny in Paris, or the V&A here in London - but perfectly formed. In fact, I can't imagine a richer or more easily digestible introduction to the subject. Sadie's favourite piece was a 14th century carving of Saint Margaret, a virtuous virgin who was no sooner swallowed by a dragon than she invoked the name of the cross, and was promptly catapulted out through the monster's stomach: she was subsequently installed as the patron saint of midwives (Sadie is training to be a midwife, athough she has never been swallowed by a dragon). My own favorite was a ring worn by Richard Coeur de Lion: partly because it always sends shivers down my spine to see something that actually had contact with the touch of a near-legendary figure, and partly because its seal was a classical image of Mercury, an unexpected blending of the ancient world with the medieval.

There was also a very effective and amusing speech from David Cameron, who opened the exhibition (the British Museum is clearly taking an educated punt on who is going to win the next election). Amid all the jokes delivered with the fluency and poise that an education at Eton presumably helps to give you, there was also a commitment to reinstate the primacy of narrative history in schools. Hurray! Let's hope he sticks to it. I'm obviously going to have to vote Conservative...

Last week was half-term, and we spent it Withnail fashion, in a picturesque but slightly 17th Century farmhouse. It was, to put it mildly, decidedly not wifi-enabled - but it is a pleasure, sometimes, just to vanish off the radar of the 21st century - and especially when you have a mammothly long and ridiculously entertaining novel to keep you going through the long February evenings. The book was Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which several people had recommended to me, and reading it I could see why. The premise was one that it took Borges only a couple of pages to explore in his (very) short story, Ragnarok – but then again, a short story would hardly have kept me going for very long, so I did not exactly begrudge Gaiman his prolixity. A man meets with a mysterious one-eyed stranger on a plane – the stranger turns out to be Odin – just one of the many gods brought to the New World by immigrants, and then forgotten – but still these discarded deities live on – shabbily, ingloriously, and yet, as it turns out, with a latent potential for magic and menace. Fantasy, of course, all fantasy – because, in reality, gods do indeed die.

"Love and History" is the title of an event I am attending tomorrow in Kensington Library. It is suddenly starting to bear down on me like a lorry on a hedgehog. Months ago, when I was asked to do the event, I cheerfully said yes - then barely gave it a second thought. Since then, the time has slipped by - and now the event is almost here. Eeek!

Yesterday, I went for a top-level meeting with assorted power-brokers from Google.

Yesterday was the 250th anniversary of the opening of the British Museum to the general public, and to mark the occasion, Neil McGregor, the director of the museum, gave a celebratory lecture. Listening to it, I could perfectly understand why the Met wanted to poach him. McGregor's theme, an explication of the philosophy that has underpinned his entire time at the BM, was essentially a celebration of the Enlightenment: of its restless curiosity about everything under the sun, and its no less voracious appetite for exploring, collecting and cataloguing the infinitude of the world's treasures. Or - as the less charitable might put it - for swanning around the globe, and pilfering things.  

Perhaps it's a mark of how affected by the rhythms of medieval life I have become, but I've found this year that the real end of Christmas was marked for me by Twelfth Night rather than New Year's Day ...

or even the first Monday after New Year's Day, that grim date when apparently more people top themselves than on any other day of the year (though given the way 2009 is already going, perhaps we'd better reserve judgement on that particular statistic this time round).

Anyway, the tinsel has been packed away, the cards recycled, and things left to gather mould over the festive period - such as websites - are now in the process of beiing dusted down. It was a good Christmas this year, by and large - despite its highlight being the theft from the boot of my car of a MASSIVELY  expensive turkey - and on Christmas morning as well! Still, I have been able to console myself with the thought of how well fed and happy it must have left the Dickensian street urchins who were doubtless reponsible for nicking it - and how much joy it has brought into the lives of everyone to whom I have related the story...

Thrilling news from my publicist Down Under! The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has apparently been spotted walking out of a bookshop, carrying a copy of 'Millennium'. I feel childishly excited...

The only previous thing I knew about Mr Rudd was that he speaks Mandarin. Clearly, he is a pretty classy kind of guy. He is now officially my Favourite World Leader, and my Third Favourite Australian. Unfortunately for Mr Rudd, not even the purchase of one of my books can serve to dislodge Shane Warne and Steve Waugh from the second and top spots, respectively. (For any non-cricket fans out there - and I know there are one or two – Warne and Waugh were the two greatest Austalian cricketers of the modern era. They also pretty much destroyed any pleasure I took in watching an Ashes series for a decade and a half, at least until England finally won the Ashes back in 2005 - but since both men have retired now, I am graciously prepared to forgive them...)

The only reason I have placed Waugh above Warne is that he gave me the opportunity to do something that I strongly suspect no one else in the entire history of book reviewing has ever done: namely, include the name of a 1990s Test cricketer in the review of a book on the Second Crusade. I was able to get away with it courtesy of the literary editor at the Sunday Telegraph, who understands the importance of such things. The review is of Jonathan Phillips' book, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom:

 

 

"Mark Waugh, the brilliant Australian cricketer whose batting all too often proved fatal to England’s Ashes hopes, was first selected to play for his country a full five years after his twin brother, Steve. During that time, as he languished in the obscurity of domestic cricket, his team-mates took to calling him “Afghanistan” – the forgotten Waugh. A nickname as witty as it was cruel: for it reflected something telling about the way in which some conflicts do indeed end up lacking in the celebrity stakes. Everyone, for instance, has heard of the First Crusade, which resulted in the capture of Jerusalem, or the Third, which featured the play-off between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. What, though, of the one that came in between? Doubtless, had the Waugh twins been surnamed ‘Crusade’, Mark’s nickname would have been ‘The Second’. 

 

Forgotten the campaign certainly has been. Not since 1866, Jonathan Phillips assures us in the introduction to his new book, has there been so much as a monograph devoted to it. The reasons for this neglect are not hard to guess. Unlike the First Crusade, the Second ended up – by and large – as a damp squib; unlike the Third, the kings who led it were decidedly unglamorous. Evidently, despite the fact that we are all supposed to feel a bit embarrassed about the crusades nowadays, the preference of most of us is still for books that focus on Christian successes. And yet, as Philllips points out, “simply because the Second Crusade failed does not mean that it offers little of interest to the modern historian.” An assertion that his scholarly but never less than gripping study more than serves to justify.

 

Indeed, it is a key mark of Phillips’ effectiveness as a historian that for much of the book he signally refuses to indulge in the condescension that is so often the consequence of hindsight. A telling achievement: for it enables him to view the preparations for the Crusade through the eyes of those who lived through them, and to demonstrate how all that was most innovatory about the crusaders’ plans and ambitions tended to have been bred of a giddy self-confidence. So dazzling had been the achievements of the First Crusade that those who followed in its wake, even as they yearned to blaze their own trail, had little doubt that God was bound to end up blessing their ventures. As a result, the Second Crusade was conducted on an even grander and more swaggering scale than the First had been. So excitable were the crowds that turned out to hear the project’s principal cheerleader, Bernard of Clairvaux, that sometimes, as Phillips nicely puts it, “like a modern celebrity, he was forced to remain in hiding for his own safety.” Instead of the dukes and adventurers who had led the First Crusade, the Second was headed by monarchs: the Kings of France and Germany, no less. Above all, rather than confining their attentions merely to the Holy Land itself, the enthusiasts for the Crusade hoped to see the frontiers of Christendom pushed back wherever they appeared under threat. So it was that, even as the main expedition headed off for the Near East, other armies of crusaders were crashing through the dark Baltic forests to engage with the pagan Slavs, or else descending on the strongholds of Muslim Spain. “The trumpet of salvation,” as a Catalan bishop boasted, “rings out throughout the world.” 

 

And yet, in the event, it was destined to sound a most uncertain note. True, there were a few notable successes, including, most significantly of all, the capture of Lisbon: an episode that Phillips recounts particularly stirringly. Nevertheless, Iberia could hardly compare with the Holy Land as a focus for Christian hopes and expectations; and even though the Kings of France and Germany did both finally limp their way into Jerusalem, that was about the limit of their achievements. What on the First Crusade had been a succession of heroic triumphs was played out again on the Second as farce. Battles against the Turks were humiliatingly lost; sieges of Muslim cities no less humiliatingly abandoned. Setting the seal on things, it was even rumoured that Eleanor of Aquitaine, the then Queen of France who had accompanied her royal husband on the expedition, had cuckolded him with her uncle, the Prince of Antioch. Well might one chronicler have derided the entire crusade as having achieved “nothing useful or worth repeating.”

 

Nothing useful, perhaps. Nevertheless, as Phillips convincingly demonstrates, it is a story that deserves better than to be glossed over. At a time when, for obvious reasons, public interest in the entire concept of holy war has never been greater, this is a book that deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in how the theology and practice of crusading evolved. Aimed primarily at an academic audience though it may be, it also merits being read as a sequel to Thomas Ashbridge’s racy and more populist account of the First Crusade. Like the Waugh twins, the two books make a most compelling pair." 

 

 

The only achievement that makes me prouder came courtesy of Justin Marozzi's excellent book on Herodotus, The Man Who Invented History. The review was in the Times Literary Supplement. For those of you who cannot be bothered to read the entire review, the cricket reference appears in the second paragraph:

 

 

"At a time when the literature of ancient Greece and Rome is increasingly fading from the public consciousness, Herodotus has emerged as one of the few classical authors currently bucking the downwards trend. In part, no doubt, this is because many of his favourite themes – from the clash of civilisations to the spectacular making and loss of fortunes – have proven to possess a peculiar resonance for the readers of 21st century headlines. Yet the enthusiasm and affection which non-specialists are capable of feeling for the Father of History often have little to do with his virtues as a historian; indeed, they tend to be inspired by those very aspects of his great work which have led more disapproving critics, ever since classical times, to dismiss him as ‘the Father of Lies’. To those who prefer their history endowed with a sober Thucydidean heft, Herodotus’ enthusiasm for the wondrous and the implausible can be a source of some frustration; but to his admirers it has long served as an inspiration. Justin Marozzi, a former Financial Times foreign correspondent who has journeyed over deserts and across steppelands in the pursuit of a good story, certainly has no hesitation in identifying him as a kindred spirit. The Father of History he may have been; but he was also, so Marozzi argues, the Father of Travel Writing. 

It is true, of course, that the precise relationship between Herodotus and his sources – his “observation, judgement and enquiry”, as he puts it in a famous passage – has been much debated by historians and philologists. Marozzi, who delightfully compares the Histories to an innings by David Gower, swats the entire controversy away with the equivalent of a Pietersen-esque reverse-sweep into the stands. “The thing about Herodotus,” he reassures the reader, “is that he doesn’t really belong in academic circles. He’s much too fun for that. And, in most cases, for them.” Unsurprisingly, then, even though Marozzi’s search for Herodotus does lead him across the path of the odd scholar, they invariably find themselves at cross-purposes. Particularly hilarious is his encounter with Pierre Briant, the doyen of Achaemenid studies, who is so bemused by Marozzi’s line of questioning that his only response to it is a wordless and “magnificently disdainful Gallic shrug.” Marozzi, like Hippocleides dancing on his table, does not care. Underpinning the entire project of his book is a conviction that there are paths to a true understanding of the Histories aside from those that lead through the lecture hall. After all, if Herodotus really did take to the road in the course of his researches, then what better way to demonstrate it than to follow in his path? 

Answering that question takes Marozzi on a wide-ranging tour of sites across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, one that proves to be simultaneously dogged and quixotic. Even in Bodrum, where Herodotus was born, he finds that traces of the great man are effectively non-existent: only a solitary bust outside the castle and a nondescript traffic junction serve to commemorate the town’s most famous son. “’These people are not interested in Herodotus,’” a local historian confides darkly, gesturing towards the Euro-trash who throng the harbour-front – “as though,” Marozzi adds, “this is an unforgivable offence.” Even more spectral, however, is his quarry’s presence in Babylon, the destination which serves as the focus of a heroic and hair-raising trip to Iraq. Not only is it improbable that Herodotus ever made it to Mesopotamia, but Babylon itself, over the intervening millennia, has crumbled away so utterly that there are only the scantiest traces left now of its ancient greatness. Those that there are, Marozzi discovers, appear to have been turned into a carpark for use by the Polish army. Here, he tries telling himself, “my suede desert boots, submerged in the dust and history of Babylon, are scuffing along in the phantom footprints of Herodotus.” Or perhaps they are simply keeping him moving as he whistles in the dark. 

Yet the paradox of Herodotus’ absence from so many of Marozzi’s destinations is that it provides him with the perfect opportunity to write what is indeed a very Herodotean book. Just like Herodotus himself, who set out to explain the origins of the Persian wars and ended up devoting almost a third of the Histories to a study of Egypt, Marozzi revels in every opportunity to go rambling off on a digression. This is a book which features – alongside the statutory ruins and museums – a Turkish nightclub, the road from Baghdad airport, gay marriage in the depths of the Egyptian desert and an exorcism. “He celebrates the wonders of the world with a life-grabbing energy that is never less than infectious”: so Marozzi praises his hero, but he might just as well have been describing himself. If the mirror that he identifies Herodotus as holding up to our times often seems in truth to reflect nothing so much as his own principles and presumptions, then his book is no less entertaining, engaging and humane for that."

Not so long ago it was The Daily Telegraph which you could bank on for articles about Roman oratory, but these days – an exciting development for progressive classicsts everywhere! – it is The Guardian which seems to have a thing for Cicero. The past week featured two fascinating articles on the great man: both making the point that, more than anyone else from antiquity, perhaps, he is the figure who seems to hold a mirror most eerily up to ourselves.

 

The first article was by Charlotte Higgins, who bids fair to beat Philip Howard as the most prolific – and certainly the most entertaining – commentator on classical affairs writing in the broadsheets today. Her thesis that Obama’s rhetoric draws on all the tricks of the trade exploited by ancient orators is wonderfully made – so too her casting of the President-elect as the equivalent of a ‘novus homo’, an arriviste without the advantages of a military background, à la Eisenhower or McCain, or the dynastic pedigree of a Bush or Clinton. It is the last point that particularly intrigues me. One of the puzzles of the Roman Republic is the way in which certain families, generation after generation, were able to dominate the competition for honours – and recent American history has helped, perhaps, to make it just that little bit more comprehensible. At one point, after all, there were commentators suggesting that the 2008 election might end up being fought by Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Perhaps that is why Obama, for all his talk of change, and the excitement of his breakthrough, is bound to disappointment those who are waiting for a full sluice-out of Washington’s Augean stable. In America, as in Cicero’s Rome, wealth and family connections will never easily be bucked. Just like Cicero, once he had obtained the consulship, so Obama, now that he is president, appears to be demonstrating that there is no choice but to pay them due obeisance.

 

The second article – as most articles these days seem to be – was about the credit crunch. Philip Kay has spotted a precedent in the wave of bankruptcies that followed Mithridates’ invasion of the province of Asia: an unsettling reminder to the Roman business class that a globalised economy might spell peril as well as opportunity. He cites De Imperio Cn. Pompei, a speech given by Cicero in 66 BC, for the explicit link that it makes between economic breakdown in one corner of the world, and financial chaos in another.

 

 

True enough – but we can hazard a guess, I think. Mithridates’ invasion was repulsed by Rome’s best general, Sulla, a victory that culminated in the wholesale despoiling of Greece and Asia Minor. Along with an assortment of columns from the 6^th C BC temple of Zeus in Athens, the works of Aristotle and a crack squad of Olympic atheletes, Sulla also helped himself to less esoteric prizes: gold, silver and slaves, and plenty of them. Then, on his return to Rome, he won a bloody civil war, and had his richest opponents proscribed, murdered, and stripped of all their worldly goods. Hardly Keynsian – but Sulla does, at any rate, seem to have been a man with a plan…

 

A lesson from history? The problem is, though, that we’ve already tried fighting a war in the Middle East, and it didn’t really help…

First I used clay tablets. Then I used papyrus. Then I used parchment. Now, at last, I have entered the 21st Century. Cyberspace, here I come. 

The voyage begins...

 

 

 

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